


Fire Down Below

by SylvanWitch



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-25
Updated: 2012-03-25
Packaged: 2017-11-02 12:44:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/369106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam's not sure how long he can hold out against the noise.  AU Episode Tag for "The Born-Again Identity."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fire Down Below

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_rant_girl](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=the_rant_girl).



They’re stumbling into the motel room, filthy, clothes fetid with the stench of burned bones, eyes red and sore from corpse smoke, and Sam’s wondering if he can drown out Lucifer’s litany of sea shanties WELL THERE’S FIRE DOWN BELOW, ME LADS with the quart of Jack Dean had stopped to buy when it happens.

Sam reels a little, WAY-HEY-HEAVE-HI-HO! off-balance from exertion and exhaustion, and Dean, half bent over untying his boot, reaches out an automatic hand to keep him from knocking them both to the ground.

Dean’s hand lands on the spot where Sam’s shirt has ridden up, and they’re skin to skin, Dean’s hand shockingly hot against Sam’s perpetually chilled flesh, and even as the heat registers, rushing to Sam’s head and making him dizzy with it, Lucifer winks out of existence and the room falls quiet but for Dean’s low, “You alright?”

The sudden stillness is so shocking that it staggers Sam, and he has to reach out a hand to steady himself. That hand, waving wildly in the empty air for solid purchase, is grasped by a strong, callused grip, and Sam opens his eyes to see Dean there, holding him upright. He hasn’t taken his other hand from Sam’s side yet, and Sam feels the echo of his pulse in the palm of Dean’s hand.

“Dean?” he asks, hushed, afraid that if he talks too loud, it’ll bring Lucifer back.

“What is it, Sam? You look like the walking dead—more than usual. And you’re shaking,” Dean adds, walking Sam backward toward the bed and pushing him to sit.

The loss of direct contact when Dean shifts his hands to Sam’s shoulders makes Sam shiver, and he lets out a sound that at any other time might embarrass him.

From behind him on the bed Lucifer singsongs, “I’M BAAAAA-AAAACK,” and Sam’s sound turns into a dry sob.

“Hey, hey, Sammy, what’s wrong?” Dean’s tone pierces Sam’s nightmare, and he looks up with pleading eyes into his brother’s bewildered face. AND WE’RE BOUND AWAY FOR AUSTRALIA Without thinking about how they don’t usually touch like this, selfish in his total desperation, he grabs Dean’s hand and presses it to his dirty neck.

“Don’t let go,” he says, closing his eyes against the relief that rushes through him. He knows without looking that Lucifer has vanished.

“Okay,” Dean says, mystified but willing, voice like a rookie orderly trying to gentle down the crazy guy.

Sam doesn’t care if Dean treats him like a head-case if it means he’ll keep his hand right where it is.

“You want to fill me in?” Dean asks a few minutes later, no trace of impatience in his voice. Sam is still with it enough to reflect that Dean is being very un-Dean-like, together enough to recognize the depths of his brother’s worry in the way he asks the question—as if the answer might mean something really awful to him.

Maybe it will.

“He’s gone,” Sam whispers, voice rough from grave-fires. 

“Your passenger?” Dean always reduces Lucifer’s power by making light of him. Sam knows it’s not meant to be funny.

He can’t say a word, only nod brokenly.

“Hey, that’s great!” Dean crows, bursting up from the bed and heading for the celebratory bottle and two plastic glasses.

“Wait—Dean!”

CAPE COD GIRLS AIN’T GOT NO FRILLS  
THEY TIE THEIR HAIR WITH CODFISH GILLS

Dean’s eyes are comically wide with shock as he remembers that he’s supposed to hold on, and he returns to Sam’s side, sitting down and picking up his hand, the one with the scar, turning it over on his own thigh to trace the faint line that had anchored Sam for a time there but can’t seem to keep him together any longer.

“Sorry,” he says quietly, all ebullience fled in the face of their dilemma.

“’sokay,” Sam says raggedly, taking a deep, shaking breath and letting it out. 

They’re quiet for awhile longer, Sam slowly relaxing in almost inverse proportion to the tension he can feel growing in his brother. Dean’s never been one for silence or stillness, and he can’t abide unexplained or unexpected gifts, either.

Like their father, Sam’s brother had always believed nothing came without cost.

“Why now?” Dean asks at last, and Sam supposes he should be grateful that Dean had held out this long. Sam shrugs—he doesn’t know—and says, “Maybe he’s fucking with us.”

“You mean maybe you are?” Dean likes to remind Sam that it’s in his head. Sam knows Dean means it to be comforting—if the monster isn’t real, it can’t get you, a fact belied by examples in their lives too numerous to count. Sometimes Sam resents the reminders, well-intentioned though they are. He can’t help but feel that Dean occasionally blames him for not being stronger, not being able to keep Lucifer out anymore.

Whatever the case, Sam pulls his hand away and stands, knees shaking, head swimming.

WHISKEY-O, JOHNNY-O  
RISE HER UP FROM DOWN BELOW

Sam might be impressed by the devil’s repertoire if it weren’t constantly reverberating through his head.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Dean chides, affection and exasperation equally evident in his voice. He takes Sam’s hand and tugs him back down onto the bed. “It can’t be Lucifer because he’s not real. There has to be another explanation.”

Sam shrugs again, too tired to think of anything beyond how good it feels not to have to listen to the din anymore. He doesn’t really care why Lucifer’s disappeared, only that he might return. The thought makes him close his hand reflexively around Dean’s, and he looks up to catch an expression on his brother’s face that he’s never seen before.

It takes him several breathless seconds to recognize it: longing.

“Dean?” he whispers, so tired, so tired, so…

“Go to sleep, Sammy,” Dean says, putting his free hand on the nape of Sam’s neck and taking the other away from Sam’s own. “Take your shoes off and lay down.”

It takes a little getting used to, the constant need for contact of some kind, but it grows easier when Dean suggests that Sam take his shirt off. Dean has to remove his hands, of course, but the split-second of lost contact results in only a syllable—bellowed at ear-piercing volume—there and then gone back down into black quiet.

Sam curls up on his side with Dean behind him, his brother’s hand wrapped around his middle and Dean’s breath warm on the back of his neck. Sam registers, dimly and as if from a great distance, that he should feel weird about this—they haven’t shared a bed since Sam was six—but it doesn’t feel weird, and if Dean is freaked out, it doesn’t show, hand against his belly warm and relaxed, mumbled, “’night,’” ordinary as ever.

He falls asleep to silence broken only by the reassuring regularity of Dean’s breath, his last clear thought the hope that Dean doesn’t let him go during the night.

He wakes to light and noise, but it’s not Lucifer’s usual clatter, only the clock radio on the nightstand blaring to life and sun filtering through the imperfectly closed curtains on the window out front.  
Dean mutters up out of sleep, flailing with one hand for the snooze button, the other still firmly anchored to Sam’s stomach, mere inches away from what Sam’s only just realized is his hard cock. Concentrating on the unsexiest things he can imagine, telling himself he gets morning wood all the time, it has nothing to do with Dean’s own wood poking mindlessly at the back of his thigh as his brother shifts a little in waking, Sam holds his breath and hopes the situation will just go away.

When Dean freezes to stone behind him, he knows the jig is up.

“Uh…” Dean starts, embarrassment painful in his gargled-gravel whisper. 

And this is Sam’s cue to tell him it’s fine, happens to everyone, but instead, a traitorous hand, driven by an impulse he can’t acknowledge, never mind name, covers Dean’s hand and slides it those few inches lower to brush against the evidence of his own need pressing against the denim fly of the jeans he wore to bed.

Dean makes a sound, half surprise, half something Sam can’t identify, and then he jerks his hand out from under Sam’s and pulls away.

As soon as he’s free of Sam’s body, the singing starts WE’LL HEAVE AND HAUL TOGETHER AWAY, HAUL AWAY, WE’LL HAUL AWAY JOE and Sam is pleading, “Dean,” not so much for a return to silence but because Dean is standing three feet from the bed with shaking hands and a look of betrayal and self-loathing on his face that makes Sam’s stomach flip, bile worrying the back of his throat for a way out.

NOW WHEN I WAS A LITTLE BOY AND SO ME MOTHER TOLD ME THAT IF I “Dean,” he says again, squeezing his eyes shut, as if that will crowd out the Devil’s screeching or erase Dean’s expression from his mind’s eye. “Please, don’t—.” WAY HAUL AWAY WE’LL HAUL AWAY THE BOWLINE “Shut up!” he cries, losing his composure, feeling his world spiraling out of control. Lucifer was bad enough before he’d shredded Sam’s life with this momentary lapse of judgment. And sure, of course he’s blaming Lucifer. Would Sam have WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH A DRUNKEN SAILOR EARLY IN THE MORNING?ever found the courage otherwise to let Dean know that he was lost long before he ever fell into the Cage? That he had desires he could never name, WAY-HAY UP SHE RISES that would draw up into his dreams and haunt his waking hours, shaking him out of rest long, long before Lucifer ever started his PUT HIM IN THE LONG BOAT ‘TIL HE’S SOBER awful encouragements? TIE HIM TO THE TAFFRAIL WH—

Dean’s hand is warm and uncertain against his neck, his thumb brushing away tears Sam hadn’t known he’d been shedding, and he’s saying, “Shhh, shhh” against Sam’s temple, lips trembling down his cheekbone, gathering salt water to wet Sam’s lips in the first kiss and last thing Sam had ever expected to feel.

After that, though Dean’s hands and lips tremble, though their shared breaths are addled by gasps and half-sobs, there’s a certain natural sense of coming home that no amount of doubt can wipe entirely away, and when Sam stops thinking of Dean as separate from himself, it seems as normal as breathing that they’re naked, Dean’s weight pressing him into the bed, Dean’s hands tracing his ribs, the muscles of his belly, the arrow of hair that leads to his cock, the cock that Dean touches at first reverently and then, at Sam’s long moan broken around Dean’s name, with a complete confidence that wrecks the last of Sam’s resolve and brings him shouting, spilling over Dean’s hand, Dean driving himself into the join of Sam’s thighs and coating him with his fluid, too, so that they are a sticky, sweaty, salt-stained mess, laughing with tears on their cheeks and a manic light in their eyes that defies any demon anywhere from ever again coming between them.

Later, when the sun paints the far wall with impressions of light and they are more or less spent, facing one another on the bed, close but not touching except for the tips of Dean’s fingers tracing the shape of Sam’s face, Sam nods under the touch for Dean to let go.

“You sure?” 

Another nod, dislodging Dean’s hold.

Sam waits, anticipating the bawdiest song.

Silence.  
He shimmies away from Dean, to the edge of the mattress, and sits up, wondering if there’s some maximum distance to be considered.

But even all the way across the room, hand on the bathroom doorframe, eyes pinned with growing hope to Dean’s own avid gaze, Sam hears nothing.

“Nothing,” he tells Dean, his own wide smile printed also on his brother’s face.

“Why do you think—?” Dean starts, but Sam holds up a hand.

This gift horse can have rotten teeth for all Sam cares. He’s not poking around in there to find out.

“Nothing,” he says again, more firmly, and Dean gives in with a graceless shrug and holds out a hand that no longer shakes to invite his brother back to their bed.

Sam wrinkles his nose and says, “Shower,” turning on his heel to enter the bathroom, Dean’s laugh, low and illicit, following him in just before Dean himself shows up, already half-hard again and wanting.

“Close the door,” Sam suggests, turning on the hot water and gauging the temperature with his hand.

Behind him, Dean does as he’s told, busying himself with something at the sink and singing unconsciously under his breath. Sam’s heard it a hundred times, a thousand. Happy or sad, exhausted or elated, Dean sings to himself at all hours in every condition. Sam strains to make out the song, sometimes a gauge of Dean’s mood. He expects to hear Zeppelin or Aerosmith, CCR or Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.

What he picks up, though, chills him through, even to the hand cupping hot water under the spewing faucet.

“Well, there’s fire down below, me lads—.”

**Author's Note:**

> All of the sea chanties herein may be found here: http://shanty.rendance.org/lyrics/shanties.php
> 
> The only exception is the title piece, "Fire Down Below," of which Nick Cave's version (the best, IMO) can be found here: http://seashanties.wikispaces.com/Fire+Down+Below


End file.
